Excel-like HTML table manipulation with Handsontable

I continually stress the importance of web programming skills to the data scientists’ repertoire, due to the fact that most users of data interact with it through a web browser. (See my previous post “Data Scientist Makes Peace with Web Programming”). Therefore I periodically showcase web development techniques from a data scientist’s perspective.

Today I’m demonstrating Handsontable, which places an Excel-like grid within a webpage that users can edit in Excel-like ways (e.g., copy and paste, drag down/sideways). The tool was created by Marcin Warpechowski and is available at http://handsontable.com/.

Like I did with jqGrid, I’ll show here how to set the display features and cell values from the server side: